Fibre Broadband - Traffic Shaping

Hi all,

I have a FTTC broadband through 'Mailbox Networks / 186k'. The speeds are pretty good (21 down, 7.5up). I've no problem with the speeds (test result below). I do have an issue with what appears to be traffic shaping, or throttling of certain types of traffic. iPlayer, Windows Update, file download are all really fast. Bittorrent on the other hand will hardly work... barely any traffic will pass. I also have an ADSL2 O2 business line (7down, 1 up) which is rock solid, albeit slower. Bittorrent traffic will fly on this line. I actually have to swap to this line for this type of download.

Originally the problem affected all bittorrent + YouTube and iplayer. I raised this with them and over the course of 3-4 weeks managed to get them to change something and allow youtube and iplayer to work properly, although they never accepted they were traffic shaping.

Do people have the same trouble with other FTTC broadband providers?

Can anyone recommend another ISP were the download caps are high & traffic isn;t throttled?


Thanks all,

Aaron


http://www.speedtest.net/result/1636573800.png

Aaron,

Your last question really is a stumbling point, everyone wants the highest possible cap and the lowest possible throttle (ideally none that is). There are lots of ISP's offering FTTC. Orly and Yarwell have this doc to show some of the providers.

Personally I'm on Plusnet. I have a 120GB a month cap that is unmetered 00:00 through to 08:00. They do have shaping, but if you opt for the Pro add-on, you can get a better service (note the use of better, they state that they will still prioritise trafic at peak times). I use a torrent client where I can restrict downloads and uploads to only take place during those times.

In reply to a post by aaronshim:

Can anyone recommend another ISP were the download caps are high & traffic isn;t throttled?

It's called a leased line

But more seriously it does come down to money. You are asking to have a greater share of your ISP's resources. That increases their costs and they will want to recoup that.

well i have no problems with bt infinity m8, i can quite regular get the full speed on torrents, and they no longer have any download restrictions, totally unlimited.

I see that with the new 80/20 service next year, the minimum download rate on the assured rate product will be 30Mbps

Ignore Anonymous. Check out Zen, ADSL24, PlusNet, etc.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

I see that with the new 80/20 service next year, the minimum download rate on the assured rate product will be 30Mbps

Throughput or sync?

Assured rate is throughput

I wondered if you really meant the assured rate - but knowing you it was probable .

Any idea what price that will be compared to bog-standard "up to"? What about assured rate on 40/20? It's probably around somewhere, but I've never seen any prices or it mentioned as being used by anyone.

Must be hard to ignore the truth